How Deep Throating Exploded Into America's Bedrooms

The year 1972 will be remembered for a lot of different things. It was then that Bobby Fisher won the World Chess Championship. It’s also when the Watergate scandal broke. But let 1972 also go down as the year that forever changed our relationship with oral sex. Because that was the year Deep Throat premiered in New York City.

The film, which introduced the late Linda Lovelace to the world, and the world to hardcore pornography, follows the struggle of a woman whose clitoris happened to live in her throat. Eventually, she realizes that the only way to stimulate the misplaced pleasure point is to pivot her oral sex technique—She must learn how to open wider and go deeper than ever before. Not before long, audiences began to adopt the same style of fellatio. And that’s how the “deep throat” method trickled off screen and into bedrooms across America.